Postmodern literature emerged out of the Leftist Marxism of the sixties. Or so I have read. I would rather call this literature ‘Progressive Deconstructionism’ because it progresses toward a complete disintegration of disclosure. If reason does not matter in so much of what universities teach, including poetry, it should be no surprise that basic facts are offensive to some students. And this is why the most radical among them riot when they do not get their way. Some postmodern poems are even less definite and more tenebrous than Thompson’s Two Ghazals. We should not let the complexion of this kind of poetry hang by just an example or two. And we don’t have to because I have an entire book of examples. Mercifully, the worthless volume was priceless, by which I mean: free. The opinion that this mad poetry was born in the mind of the Left is all but completely proven considering where the twenty-seven poets featured in the anthology reside. The installments, then, in this book called, Verse, Vol. 7, No. 1, are written by poets living where we would expect them to live: in democratic districts. Except for seven of them (five of whom have no place of residence given), they live in the following places: San Diego, San Francisco, Berkeley, northern California, Sebastopol (also in California), Washington State, Washington D. C., New York City, Connecticut, London (in England), Toronto, and Vancouver. Here follow two examples of postmodern verse from this book. They are, by no means, atypical; these two examples are pretty much what the whole book is like. I will give a whole stanza from each poet, not to suggest that taking poetry of this kind out of context is possible.
From Making It Up by Rae Armantrout
What do you call it
when men dress up
as barber poles:
a different century
or an ice-cream parlor
full of crying kids?
A father hit one and said,
“I didn’t touch you.”
From Ruck by Lary Timewell
Reconstruction ancyclicals,
superencipherment of the
snug in antebellum, one
Ophuls needed to
smartkid antidote,
discuss expenditures,
turf lurkers,
bundle negatives,
scratch horses,
and shun statistics against
“a steady backbeat of abiding concerns,”
like, say,
Reconsider Baby.
Both poems defy explication except to say that they are inexplicable. The second of these is more than merely sesquipedalian: the inclusion of long words just because. A couple of its long words are invented, not out of thin air, but out of a brain that has been trained to believe that this is what poetry should look like and sound like. Obviously, these poems are impossible to interpret. The editor of this volume admits that footnotes would not help us to understand the meaning of such poetry, as it so frequently consists of what he honestly calls ‘wholesale derangement.’ Indeed, because more sense can be produced by the ‘See ‘N Say Story Maker’ by Mattel, a toy that combines prepared phrases to delight the toddler at the push of a button. I will push this button right now and get more sense from Mattel’s toy than from the two poems quoted above: “The cat sat on a fat goat on the moon.” One more time, because it’s so much fun to make fun of postmodern poetry: “The turkey kissed a barking ‘woof woof’ bug in my shoes.”
